Founded in 2005 and
headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan with engineering support and sales teams in
China, Europe, Japan, and the US - Innodisk is a service driven
provider of flash memory and DRAM products for industrial and enterprise
applications.

With satisfied customers across the embedded, aerospace
and defense, cloud storage markets and more, we have set ourselves apart with a
commitment to deliver dependable products and unparalleled service.

This
has resulted in a diverse range of products from embedded peripherals designed
to supplement existing industrial solutions to high IOPS flash arrays for
industrial and enterprise applications.

Innodisk is set on the path
of being a comprehensive solutions and service provider in the industrial
storage industry. For more information please visit http://www.innodisk.com.

Editor:- November 14, 2016 - in a new blog on StorageSearch.com I discuss some
of the tempestuous changes in the SSD market to their influences on a single
company - Innodisk. This was one of those interviews when all the
pieces seemed to come together. ...read
the article

I had been wanting to learn more about the internal
thinking in Innodisk for some time- as I could see in glimpses of technology
which appeared in their products - that there was evidence of original thinking
there - and significant investment in unique controller IP.

I didn't
know the details and wanted to learn more.

So I requested an SSD
conversation with Charles
Tsai, Senior Director - Innodisk - and we spoke for about an hour on
topics like new ways to design enterprise flash arrays and about new ways to
make industrial SSDs better which borrow concepts from cloud architecture.

That
led me to re-evaluate - not only my assessment of the company - but also change
my opinion of what they were doing in the rackmount SSD market too.

I
had been very dismissive in my comments about - Innodisk's FlexiArray - when
the company launched that product in
November 2013 - as
you can see from my archive comments in the original news story.

The
company is part of a new set of trendsetters in the SSD market who - learning
from the experience of many customers (and in particular big cloud / web
users) are now starting to partition their flash management functions in a more
powerful and flexible
way - so that the responsibility for some actions is decided at a higher level
in the firmware - rather than simply dumping everything onto the controller
inside the drive - which doesn't have the same visibility of what might be
happening in other SSDs - or upstream in the host requests.

This
collaborative approach can lead to better efficiency, reliability and
performance.

In June
2008 -
InnoDisk announced the
world's physically smallest SATA SSD - the SATADOM - measuring 39mm by 20.5mm
by 8mm. Capacity ranges from 128MB to 8GB. The SLC flash SSD has a
sustainable read speed of 24MB/sec and write speed of 14MB/sec.

It has an internal
RAID allocation function
enabling users to trade between capacity between data protection and
performance (over-provisioning).
Its Power Guard protection ensures data will be written into flash when
power is interrupted unexpectedly.

Although it sounds remarkably
similar to the type of products that
Fusion-io was
shipping a year ago - InnoDisk says it's an original design based on their own
firmware and IP

In
August 2011
- C.C. Wu -
Director - InnoDisk -
presented a paper -
Quality
Comparisons of SLC, MLC and eMLC (pdf) - at the Flash Memory Summit. Wu's
paper - which compares data for several generations and brands of SLC flash -
confirms what some SSD makers had been telling me since the early 2000s (as
reported in my SSD
endurance article) - which is to say that SLC in reality has often been 5x
to 20x better than specified in the chip memory datasheets. The same is
not true for MLC - however - which presents greater risks of data loss when
power is
suddenly turned off - which in turn requires better
SSD controller
architecture to recover and automatcially heal the data.

In September 2011 -
InnoDisk claimed in a
news story that its MLC based, .EverGreen Plus Series has a lifespan which is
7x longer than traditional SLC SSDs, and 140x better than conventional MLC SSDs
- due to a combination of features in its SSD architecture.

In
January 2014
- InnoDisk announced
full scale production of its nanoSSD (a tiny industrial SSD) that conforms to
JEDEC's standard (MO-276).

In November 2014 -
InnoDisk
spun off the business unit associated with developing and marketing its
FlexiArray systems (1U InfiniBand / iSCSI 10GbE enterprise flash arrays) into a
new company called AccelStor.

Their technique - called
iSLCT
technology is different to other adaptive R/W types in the market insofar as
it sacrifices the potential capacity advantage of MLC over SLC to deliver a
nearly as good as SLC reliability and speed and data retention from MLC over
the industrial temperature range at a lower than SLC cost for the same capacity.
See also:-aspects of
the hidden SSD capacity iceberge.

Among other things in this article Wu cautions
readers about the limitations of encrypted SSDs...

"As strong as
the 256-bit AES encryption is on encrypted SSDs, it only protects data at rest,
i.e., when the system is turned off. To protect data in flight,
data-loss-prevention (DLP) techniques, use of secure communication protocols,
and other measures must be taken." ...read
the article

..

dual port
GbE and USB in M.2 SSD from InnoDisk

Editor:- November 3, 2015 - InnoDisk today
announced
a product first for the M.2 SSD
market in the shape of a dual port isolated GbE compatible model -
EGUL-G201 - which also has a USB
3 interface, and fits in a 22x60mm footprint. InnoDisk says the ethernet modules
have strong electrical isolation, ESD and surge protection.

"The customer really
just wants a faster SSD with more capacity" - said Charles Tsai at
Innodisk - when talking about the market for his company's FlexiArray (a 1U
rackmount SSD for embedded applications).

Editor:- September 24, 2015 - InnoDisk today
announced
an enhanced version of its previously available
Pin
7 power cable eliminator technology for use with small embedded SATA
SSDs - such as those used on server motherboards (and in particular the
company's
ServerDOM
SSDs which won a design award in
January 2015.
Innodisk's new SATA Pin 8 Vcc technology - which is available on motherboards
from top manufacturers - eliminates the need for a separate power cable and is
also compatible with hot swap.

..

How adaptive is the SSD
behavior to changes within itself?

All SSDs rely on processing data
about the quality of the memory as part of their normal data integrity
operations.

They wouldn't work without it.

But some companies have SSD IP sets in which knowledge about different
parts of the SSD can be optimized and fed back to control and enhance SSD
functionality over and beyond the standard accepted SSD function block
boundaries.

The degree to which this passing of the intelligence
(regarding the state of past and future anticipatable data flows, priorities
of the application and the flash array's own readiness and healthiness
condition) can impact behavior in other parts of the SSD - is what I call
adaptive intelligence flow symmetry.

A key assumption in InnoDisk's design is that
some data corruption is inevitable at the point when power is interrupted -
despite the best efforts of the hold up capacitors etc - because other parts of
the system - outside this power protected zone are also disturbed. So their
algorithms - on power up - begin by looking for such errors and data
inconsistencies and proceed to clean up and rebuild the mapping tables. ...read the article (pdf)

Every year I learn 2 new
important new ideas about SSDs. But every year I also have to remember to forget
or discard 1 old idea which was vital to know before because it's no longer
useful, valid or true

This delivers 10x better endurance than MLC
(30K from "3K" MLC), faster write performance (nearly 2x as fast as
MLC and 85% of SLC speed - at competing geometries) and lower cost than using
SLC to achieve the same capacity (in current and projected market conditions).

Editor's comments:- I mentioned this technique several years
ago in a spoof SSD story - but what was once SSD fiction has become market
reality due to the divergent market
prices of different
types of flash memory.